Markings
by LegalBlonde
Summary: COMPLETE. She's marked him, the way she always has, the way she always will. JI.
1. Chapter One

Rating: PG

Ship: J/I

Spoilers/Timeline: None, really. Say general S3.

Archive: CM, anyone else drop me a line.

Disclaimer: Jack, Irina, and Sydney belong to JJ Abrams and his various legal entities, not me.  Don't sue.

AN: Written for SD-1 October challenge.  Requirements: character death(!), costumes, and the included quotation by Dylan Thomas.

Summary: "She's marked him, the way she always has, the way she always will."

******

In his dreams, she wears solid black and lets her loose hair brush his skin.  She speaks to him in cryptic sentences and smiles beneath his lips, laughing against his skin.  In reality, she wears green and gray and pulls her hair back tight, beneath a blonde wig, and she levels a gun at his head when he rounds the corner.  

Then she's up against him, hands slipping beneath the bulletproof vest, slamming him into the wall.  His breath hitches and hers runs rough before she kisses him, and after, hands still beneath his vest, tendrils of the stiff blonde wig sticking to his neck.  

She's still smiling as she backs away, pulling his gun from his belt, leaving a small computer disc in its place.  She turns on her heel and fires two shots through the flat-pane window; she lets his gun clatter to the tile as she disappears down the outside wall.

He lets his head scrape back against the rough pillar and feels the sting of sharp glass where it cut through the fabric, just above his ankles.  It's some strange obsession she has, marking him this way.  

In his dreams, it's conscious, a choice to make him remember, to leave some part of herself behind.  In reality, it's accidental, the byproduct of two people too rushed with one another, of quick meetings in the dead of night.

******

In his memory, she's more herself, her voice more harsh and her accent more prominent.  When she laughs, it's deep and throaty, and when she whispers, her lips tickle his ears.  

In reality, his cell phone trills late at night, and he answers it half-asleep. She's speaking quickly, quietly, half a world away.  She disconnects without saying goodbye, and he lies awake long after her voice dies away.

******

She trails her fingers down his leg beneath a metal table heating in the sun, water droplets running in rivulets down their water glasses and dripping down onto their clothing; sun reflecting off the surface of the pool.

The hotel lies on the coast of a country without extradition, carved into a mountainside by the sea.  The sun bounces off the water early every morning, and the pool and the tables and the cool stucco walls glow crimson red. 

He spends a week there in late November, a city on the other side of the world, where the seasons turn upside down.  His wingtips grind dry leaves beneath him as he leaves, and again when he returns, but for this week he lives beside the ocean and calls himself by a different name.  

He tells himself every night he will not come to her, and so she comes to him, draws him out, makes him remember.  He wakes every morning to brown hair trailed across his pillow; he sleeps with one hand splayed out across her back, where he can feel her breathe.

And when he wakes one morning with no breath beneath his hand, no hair beneath his cheek, he knows why she has gone; he knows she will not tell him where.  So he returns to his life behind the blank walls of a blank building, where the brown leaves crumple beneath his feet.

******

He finds her in a city at the edge of civilization, wrapped in brightly colored silk, sandaled feet scuffing through the blowing dust.  Cracks like spiderwebs cross the ground, so deep you can reach four fingers between the shingles of dirt and never touch earth.  He bends with both knees on the caked dirt and plunges his fingers in, feeling a dry, baking wind over bare, baking earth.  She kisses his lips, though they are dry and cracked as the ground, and she pours cool water over his head, running down his shoulders and onto the parched earth.  Her silk skirts whip around him and stick to his skin, wet and thick.  They bleed purple and red onto his shirt, onto his skin, and hours after he leaves the colors still stain him.  

She's marked him, the way she always has, the way she always will.

*******

He's paid for these rendezvous before, and he will pay again.  Sometimes he makes atonement with scotch; he's made it twice in solitary, six times in interrogation, and far more often through information.  When the intel is good, no one looks too closely, and her intel is the best.  

But their eyes dart to one side when he enters the room, and for a moment he wonders if they know, wonders if they can read every mark on his skin.

She says she'll leave Rambaldi behind, that she's moved beyond the foolish quest.  He smiles, and nods his head, and trails four fingers through her hair.  He does not say he believes her, because he knows better.  Because he knows what he will not tell her: that he will come to her either way.  

(Because he knows she has marked him; knows he cannot get away.)


	2. Chapter Two

******

He tips her off in late October, when the leaves begin to crunch beneath his feet again.  She's stunning and striking and beautiful behind a grotesque mask, a leering dragon breathing flame.    

He's a man without a face, without a name, blank mask over a bandaged face, dark clothes hiding his frame.  The invisible man, she whispers, her words rumbling like a laugh.  He nods his head, eyes squinting at the glittering mask and its lurid flames.  

They dance in circles, finding their own rhythm, and once, just once, her heel dips too quickly and clips his calf.  She smiles; he frowns: she has marked him once again.  

He steps in close and whispers in her ear, tells her the plot, the timing, what she must do to get away.  She nods her head, lurid dragon's face dipping toward his chest, and trails the fingers of one hand down his bandaged neck. 

She invites him to stay, beckoning with a nod of her head and a flick of her eyes.  She invites him to follow her up the wide, winding staircase and see what he finds beneath the lurid mask, beneath the flame-colored robes that flutter against her calves.  He follows her glance up the stairs, blank face beneath a blank mask, and slides his fingers down onto her wrist, where he can feel her pulse, strong and warm and erratic beneath her sleeves.  He shakes his head, just once, slowly, and she trails her hands across his back as she slides away.  

******

He follows a team into an empty compound and feigns surprise at what they find.  Their voices echo off the blank walls and reverberate through the empty rooms.  They find only her fingerprints and her handwriting and the scent of gunpowder faint on the air.  

In one of the rooms, on a window, he sees the sunrays bent by dust and grime and, ever so faintly, smudges where fingers trailed across the glass.  The mark of an eye.  The mark she promised to stop chasing, so long ago.  

He sinks to the ground, back flush against the cool cement, and rubs the bruise on his calf.  

******

When he dreams of her, she comes to him in silence, fingers pressed against his lips, lips pressed against his lips, willing him not to speak.  When he wakes, she comes to him again, with looks and insinuations and whispers, and he speaks to her in terse, clipped terms.  Always about the mission, always about the goals.  Always about what she can give him, what he wants from her.    Never about what he needs.

In reality, he sits on the plane alone after she leaves, staring out the black window at white clouds whipping past beneath him.  He wipes down surfaces and erases fingerprints and bandages the abrasions on his arm.  

In reality, she leaves clipped instructions and a quiet goodbye.  In his dreams, she knows what he cannot say.

******

He carries pictures of their daughter in his wallet, clipped small so he can hide their stiff edges behind his credit cards.  She knows why he carries these -- she grabs for them with greedy fingers, plucking his wallet from the pockets of discarded clothing, sweat-slick hands staining the brown leather.  She touches the photos with reverence, only on the edges, and smiles ever so slightly to see her daughter's face.     

In spring, when the rains come, he removes his favorite picture and places it beside her on the bed.  He traces one hand down her back before he leaves, feels the rise and fall of her breathing, and slips out before the coming day.  He glances back only once before going; her fingers curl around the snapshot in her sleep.

******

In fall, when the earth is painted brown and the leaves crumple beneath his feet again, he makes the mistake of asking her what he believes: whether she means it, whether she has left it all behind.  

She lies to him; he can read it in her eyes.  

She dismisses further questions with a wave of her hand, fingers curling around a stub pencil as she writes the coordinates he needs on a folding map.  

*******

He follows the numbers a month later, when the wind blows bitter.  He follows her to this spot, white and bare and frozen, deep in the north of her home country.  She wears a long coat, buttoned and belted, and her lips turn purple in the bitter wind.  She reaches out for him, grasping his arm, and he can feel the heat from her fingertips through the thick leather gloves.  

He walks unsteadily in the driving snow, the wind so strong and snow so white that sometimes he cannot even see her back; he can only follow the pull of her hand, the heat of her fingertips.  He follows her down into the dark caves, and she never looks back at him, never hesitates, never moves her fingertips from his arm.  They make the trade in pitch black, his information for the device she keeps hidden here, and when they have finished she slides off her gloves.  She slides her hands up his arms, down his chest, beneath his coat, and the heat from her fingertips sears his skin.  

He kisses her cheeks and her wrists and her fingertips, every place left uncovered, each portion of exposed skin.  Her face is cold and coated with the driving snow; he feels it melt against his skin.  She leads him out through the pitch darkness; he follows her fingertips, still damp from the melted snow.  He wonders what else she safeguards in the black caves, how much of herself she keeps hidden from him.  

*******

She must wish to atone for her secrets, or perhaps she misses him more than she says.  She invites him to a quiet spot on the warm sand, far from any mapmaker or satellite.  He thinks of her when he sees the house: natural wood and stone, graceful, hidden beneath the trees.  She sits against the front door, back bare against the rough-hewn posts, and lets her feet trail in the white sand.  He spends a week there when the sun grows warm, when he begins to grind flower-petals beneath his shoes.  He follows her down the narrow beach, stepping around the blooms that open red on the white sand.  He sits beside her in the surf, her silk sarong whipping against his legs, her hair whipping across her bare back.  They stay for hours in the surf, feeling its rhythm, strong and endless and even.  At night he feels her breathing beneath his hand.  

She seems more in her element, in this place: the closest thing to a home that she has.  She is more the Irina of his dreams, with her smooth skin and throaty laugh.  He sits beside her at the front door, rough-hewn wood prickly against his bare back.  He reads the words she has written there, etched in varying languages in block text.   

Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

She writes only this in English; he reads it with his eyes and through his hands.  He looks at the deep-carved letters, then up at her, the deep-carved lines around her eyes.  A thought stabs through him, cold and sharp as the Russian wind, and he reaches for the warmth of her fingertips.  

They spend long days at the edge of the ocean.  He delays his departure once, twice, and when he leaves she watches him from her spot on the warm sand.

******


	3. Chapter Three

He feels that same stab when the intel comes in, cold and bitter, and he's in the middle of Ops Center without her fingertips to warm him.  The others speak of this new Rambaldi artifact with hushed tones, equal parts awe and fear.  A simple figure of blown glass, but with the potential…

He doesn't wait for the potential.  He tries four phone numbers and three email accounts.  

Nothing.  Not one word.

He closes his eyes and pictures her body on the warm sand, the silk of her skirt whipping against his legs.  She smiled at him, warm and serene.  He should have wondered, he should have asked – _no_.  He was distracted then, by the feel of her touch and her skirt and her skin.  Distracted by the things she whispered to him, so low he could barely hear over the surf.  Distracted by the lies she was so bent on telling, the illusion she was so determined to give him.  It was her gift to him, he knows.  The happy ending he always wanted, never admitted to wanting.  Just like Irina, to give him a lie.  

The object is hidden in a monastery on a cliffside, buildings little more than caves carved into the stone.  He shudders at the sight of the arched windows, looking over a sparkling sea and minute stretch of white sand, hundreds of feet below.

He hears the report over his comm link, the hurried, hushed words of the team entering the building, an agent's light gasp when they find her.  They have her surrounded, backed into the proverbial corner.  

And he knows in their sudden silence what choice she has made; knows even before she makes it.  

Because this is what he knows of her:  he knows she will rage, she will burn, and die out like a flash of fire, searing his skin.  No whispered last words or drawn-out deathbed confessionals for Irina.  She leaves this life in silence, arms stretched straight out as she falls, no sign of fear as she tumbles from the sky.   

He finds her on the warm sand, body bent and slack like a child's discarded sack of marbles.  The Rambaldi artifact is beside her, shattered into pieces that glitter like diamonds on the sand.  He kneels down beside her wrist, flung out beside her, as if still reaching for the shattered remnants.  He can see the edge of something white poking out from her sleeve, and he lifts her wrist, lifts it where he once felt her pulse, warm and strong and erratic.  

That pulse is still now, absent beneath her still-warm skin.  

He slides the paper from her sleeve and turns it over, already knowing what he will find.  The picture of their daughter, his favorite, the one her fingers once curled around in her sleep.  The photo itself is curled now, and dull as if it has spent many days against her skin.  He slides back her sleeve, ready to replace it against her wrist, to let it remain where it belongs.  Then he freezes, not believing at first what he sees.

Red lines like nail-marks, drawn upon her skin.  Letters carved deep, like the letters she carved into the doorposts, but these are far more personal, far more prominent.  And far more permanent, now that she has lost the ability to heal.  

Four letters, marked on her skin.  

_Jack_.

******

They ask him to explain, to sum up, to tell them what he learned from her, whether she was a sinner or a saint.  He closes his eyes, pictures her smiling beside the blood-red sunrise, and he tells them she was both, and tells them she was neither.  He says only that she lived just as she died: caught between her daughter, her husband, and her obsession. 

He does not say the final part, does not tell them about the markings.  Does not tell them what they mean: that he never understood her love, the only way she knew to give it, but that he understands it now.  

That this last mark, he knows, is the deepest of all.


End file.
